Bol'shaia igra, 1856–1907: Mify i realii rossiisko-britanskikh otnoshenii v Tsentral'noi iVostochnoi Azii by E. Iu. SergeevReview by: Alexander MorrisonSlavic Review, Vol. 72, No. 4 (WINTER 2013), pp. 892-893Published by:Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5612/slavicreview.72.4.0892 .

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892 Slavic Review

reconstruct the voices of ordinary Russians but relies almost exclusively on learned sources such as hagiographies, sermons, polemical treatises, proclamations, and let-ters. Popular sources, such as petitions sent to Tsar Dmitrii I, vision tales, and “tales of anger and woe . . . circulat[ing] throughout the country” (164), are mentioned but not examined. Similarly, Gruber presents little specifi c evidence concerning how the new popular “Orthodoxy of rebellion” (153) might have infl uenced the minds of church schismatics under Patriarch Nikon. The cited writings of learned church crit-ics such as the monks Arsenii, Shakhovskoi, and Avvakum hardly refl ect continuities in popular sentiments.

The principal value of Gruber’s book is that it reveals the underpinnings of early modern Russian church power: church leaders’ pivotal legitimizing role in Muscovy’s political system; their opportunism as demonstrated by close association with all of the Smuta’s rulers (including Dmitrii I); and their lucrative business activities and enor-mous wealth. Gruber’s book is an important contribution to understanding the relations between ideology and pragmatism in the Russian church elite’s pursuit of power.

Georg MichelsUniversity of California, Riverside

Bol shaia igra, 1856–1907: Mify i realii rossiisko-britanskikh otnoshenii v Tsentral΄noi i Vostochnoi Azii. By E. Iu. Sergeev. Moscow: Tovarishchestvo nauchnykh izdanii KMK, 2012. 454 pp. Appendix. Notes. Bibliography. Index. Illustrations. Maps. Rubles 800.00, hard bound.

The “Great Game” is an astonishingly persistent historical cliché. Every year two or three pot-boilers featuring the same self-mythologizing coterie of bewhiskered Indian army offi cers appear, all based on the same limited collection of English- language sources, and all adding precisely nothing to what we already know about this hack-neyed topic. By contrast, E. Iu. Sergeev’s book is a serious work of diplomatic history (a topic neglected in recent Anglophone historiography) based on exhaustive archival research in Moscow, St. Petersburg, London, Tashkent, and even (apparently) Ash-khabad. Although the sections on Tibet and the Far East are no great advance on earlier works by Tatiana Shaumian and David Schimmelpenninck van der Oye, on Central Asia this book is superior to any current work in English. Its use of Russian and British archives side-by-side allows an escape from the parochial obsession of the latter with a chimerical “threat to India” that rarely featured in Russian calcula-tions. The only signifi cant attempt by the Russians to use their position in Central Asia in this way came in 1878, when they combined troop maneuvers with the Stole-tov embassy to Kabul, a tactic that backfi red in the short term by provoking a British invasion of Afghanistan: even in this instance there seems to have been a lack of serious intent. Within Russian historiography, Sergeev’s book is a vast improvement on the jingoism peddled by Evgenii Glushchenko, or the bogus Soviet narrative of the prisoedinenie (uniting) of Central Asia to the empire, which cast the British as the sole aggressors. Throughout his analysis Sergeev views Britain and Russia as two colonial powers engaged in a broadly comparable enterprise, and for this he deserves considerable credit. Nevertheless, his decision to use the conventional framework of the Great Game causes some problems in his interpretation of this rich material.

The chronological span of the book—from the end of the Crimean War to the Anglo-Russian agreement in 1907—makes little sense, as in Central Asia events moved to a diff erent dynamic. The Russian rivalry with Britain in Asia began at the latest with the treaty of Turkmanchai in 1828, and a history of Anglo-Russian relations that

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Book Reviews 893

omits the First Afghan War and the 1839 expedition to Khiva (each conceived by one power as a response to a threat supposedly posed by the other) cannot be considered comprehensive. Equally, Jennifer Siegel has shown in Endgame: Britain, Russia and the Final Struggle for Central Asia (2002) that diplomatic confl ict and rivalry between Britain and Russia in Asia continued almost unabated aft er what Sergeev describes as the “diplomatic revolution” that resulted in the 1907 agreement. Sergeev rejects Siegel’s conclusions but does not explain why.

The most signifi cant problem is that framing this story as a “Great Game” played on what Lord Curzon referred to as the “Asian chessboard” marginalizes local ac-tors, whether these are the Shah of Persia; the Amirs of Afghanistan, Bukhara, and Kashgar; the Khans of Kokand and Khiva; or the shift ing alliances among the Turk-men and the Kazakhs. This is deeply misleading: most of the time the empire’s mili-tary leadership was more concerned about its relations with these groups than it was about the British. Sergeev shows little interest in the personalities or policies of the Central Asian states, something revealed in the list of rulers he provides in the ap-pendix, which for Afghanistan omits Yaqub Khan, the son of Sher ’Ali whose brief reign came to an end with the massacre of the British mission at Kabul in 1879, and for Kokand omits Mullah ’Alimqul, the real ruler of the khanate during the crucial three years before the fall of Tashkent in 1865. It is true that Sergeev is writing a his-tory of Anglo-Russian diplomatic relations in Central Asia rather than of the Russian conquest of the region, but the two subjects do overlap substantially, and his insis-tence that the former played a decisive role in determining the speed and timing of the latter leads him into error. For instance, Sergeev suggests that the annexation of Khiva in 1873 came about because of rivalry with Britain, exacerbated by Khivan intransigence. For the latter point he relies on Dmitrii Miliutin’s later memoirs, which are not a reliable guide to what he or others said at the time. In fact the Khivans made desperate attempts to reach a peaceful settlement throughout 1872–73, sending an ishan (a spiritual leader) from Mangishlaq to treat with the Russians at Tifl is, but to no avail. General Konstantin von Kaufman was determined to avenge earlier Russian humiliations under Prince Aleksandr Bekovich-Cherkasskii in 1717 and Count Lev Perovskii in 1839, and also to have a campaign that would redound solely to his credit and would not be shared with his great rival Mikhail Cherniaev—he spent almost as much time planning the offi cial history as he did organizing the campaign itself. None of this is visible in Sergeev’s account.

Finally, Sergeev’s work is not free from orientalist stereotypes, repeating uncriti-cally the tsarist historian M. A. Terent ev’s grotesque account of Turkmen using the subcutaneous fat of Russian soldiers to bind their wounds aft er the Russian defeat at Denghil-tepe in 1879, which he seems to off er in partial mitigation of M. D. Skobelev’s massacre of thousands of men, women, and children at Gök-tepe two years later. There is no attempt to use Central Asian narrative sources (many of which are now available in Russian and English translation) as a counterpoint. Perhaps in conse-quence, there are numerous misspellings of Central Asian names—Abdel Melik Khan for ’Abd al-Malik Tura (104) and Pende for the Panjdeh oasis (179–82).

Bol shaia igra is an impressive feat of empirical research, and it adds signifi cantly to our understanding of Anglo-Russian relations in the second half of the nineteenth century. There are very few Russian historians with Sergeev’s deep knowledge of British archival sources, and until now no Anglophone historian has used Russian archives so comprehensively to examine this much-mythologized theme in the his-tory of Anglo-Indian foreign policy. Nevertheless, as an interpretative framework the Great Game is fundamentally fl awed.

Alexander MorrisonUniversity of Liverpool

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